Raffi Lavie

Raffi Lavie was an Israeli artist who was born in Tel Aviv in 1937. He was a charismatic teacher and mentor. He was one of three artists (with Arie Aroch and Aviva Uri) who led Israeli art into the contemporary art world in the 1960’s. Raffi Lavie was the most central, charismatic figure in the art scene in Israel for the past four decades until his death in 2007.

A major force in Israeli art, Lavie’s works are likened to those of the American Cy Twombly. He introduced the avant-garde of his time to Israel by adapting its components into a local discourse. His art reflected the spirit of Tel Aviv with its walls of poster remains and graffiti. A master of subtle colors and composition Raffi Lavie was a superb abstract expressionist. He taught and influenced many of Israel’s major artists.

Raffi Lavie's work is a cross between graffiti and abstract expressionism. He was Influenced by Paul Klee, Jean Dubuffet, and Robert Rauschenberg, as well as by local artists such as Aviva Uri and Arie Aroch.

He studied at the Art Teachers' Training College in Tel Aviv and later taught at the Art Teachers' Training College in Ramat Hasharon. In addition to his work as an artist, Lavie was a prominent teacher at the Hamidrasha School of Art, Ramat Hasharon, and later at Beit Berl. In this capacity Raffi Lavie nurtured a group of artists with a penchant for conceptual art.

In the late 1950s he created his first significant works, drawings that were similar in style to children's drawings. In the early 1960s, Raffi Lavie began to paint in spontaneous scrawls reminiscent of graffiti and comic strip art. He wrote on his paintings as if they were walls covered with scribbles. His work has been described as angry, nervous, aggressive, and abrasive. He was invited to exhibit with New Horizons but his work challenged the delicate lyricism of the group.

In 1965 Raffi Lavie was a founder of the group Ten Plus that sought an alternative to the "lyrical abstraction" of the New Horizons group. This group was the first to import pop art, avant-garde, found art, collage and photography into their work. The group organized 10 collective exhibitions, which expressed the influence of American art, especially pop art, on Israeli art. In Lavie's work we see the use of glued objects (collage), "childish" scribbles, and painting on plywood panels, as well as the use of visual images such as street advertisements, magazine photos, etc. He scorned bourgeois prototypes of beauty, and sought to restore the image to art after its banishment by New Horizons.

For most of his life Rafi Lavie opposed all iconological interpretations of his works, embracing instead a modernist-formalist interpretation.

Due to severe back problems, Lavie painted in his last years while sitting.

In 2002, a retrospective exhibit opened at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem on Lavie entitled "Raffi Lavie: Works from 1950 to 2002". This exhibit had a new interpretation of Lavie and his followers work. The new interpretation showed how Lavie's work was romantic, rich, filled with the Jewish religion and European roots.